60 Years in Space: The Return

Artistbloomyk
This post isn't about Magnus, but god damn is this what my brain feels like right now.

**

• Part 1: Crew & Mission Generation 
• Part 2: Rocket Science
• Part 3: Mission Year 1 
• Part 4: Mission Years 2-4 
• Part 5: Wrap-up 

 

I think the stress of this year might be getting to me. 

Thanks to a couple years of updates, the play reports over at Worldbuilding from Scratch, and an interactive High Frontier map, I think I actually have the tools to play Andrew Doull's 60 Years in Space. I tried before, and I failed. I have returned for one mission, just to test it. Just to stick a harpoon in the white whale.

Lu and Tubalkhan help my categorically insane ass.

So as not to fall to hubris as easily as I typically do, I am going to do one (1) mission, and I am going to do it rules-as-written. This is to stop me from homebrewing or attempting to change systems I’m not fond of, which I had already begun to do while writing this introduction because I am a compulsive tinkerer. One mission, rules-as-written (barring house rules from I pull from WfS or anything that needs massaged while playing solo), we’ll see where we end up.

I will also be providing page number citations for everything I do, as well as marking particularly confusing rules or wording; this will hopefully be a useful resource for potential players / feedback for the author.

Book Abbreviations

• Crewed Rules (CR) - Core rules
• This Space Intentionally (SI) - Spaceship & mission builder
• A Facility with Words (FW) - Base builder spinoff game
• All Errors My Own (AE) - Social and mission control trends
• A Lot of Zeroes  (LZ) - Standalone far-future spinoff game

0. Setup

Since this is a default game, I’ll be playing  as a second-wave crew starting in 2040. At least one faction has already gotten into space and started building infrastructure at this point, so my faction is trying to catch up.

Commentary: 60 Years featured zoomed-in and zoomed-out playstyles (the latter is called Dollhouse Play in the text) - playing solo more or less necessitates dollhouse play, and most of the procedural elements are in support of it. For a game of this complexity, I don’t think multiple players is a particularly viable playstyle.

1. Space Politics (CR 28)

Space Politics is a color code that generalizes the Vibe of Current Events in Space and summarizes how people get into space. This will change over time, and will influence later trends and developments. It’s a background element with fingers in many pies, and I've got issues with it that I do not have the space to hash out here.

I roll 5 + 2, which means my starting Space Politics is Purple.

“Multilateral: Space exploration is regulated through a transnational body such as the United Nations, where member states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) determine the regulations through diplomacy, lobbying and political grand-standing.”

Man, I wish my forecast for 2040 was that optimistic. 

Commentary: I like the idea of the BSU (Basic Social Unit) color system - it’s basically the Magic the Gathering color wheel, after all, and that’s the perfect alignment system - it breaks down completely in practice. You'll see what I mean later on.

Commentary: The space between the present and the game is elided out of necessity, but I do wonder if it’s enough. Two, potentially three of the five colors basically require alternate history to get to that point, and if we’re going that route 

Homebrew: Before I forced myself to drop homebrewing, I whipped up an easy alternate version of Space Politics that ditched the direct ideological affiliation in favor of a DEFCON style “how fucked is everything” spectrum, keeping the bonuses as-is.

• Red - Shit’s fucked 
• Orange - Shit’s bad 
• Yellow - Shit’s mid
• Green - Shit’s good
• Blue - Shit’s great

Colors were changed to be more instantly recognizable as a bad-to-good spectrum.

Commentary: I don’t understand what the Player Actions table is supposed to be, because it reads like a joke. You don’t need a table to give permission for people to drink water.

Proofing Note: The table for Space Politics is found on CR 28, at the tail end of the “Actions” chapter between the sections for “Timekeeping” and “ Trouble”; the Space Politics section heading is on CR 29, which doesn’t face the table. This specific formatting issue of tables not appearing under their own headings is going to be a recurring theme going forward.

Proofing Note: I don’t know why Space Politics is in the “Actions” chapter - Actions should be moved later, probably post chargen in skills, and Space Politics should be re-assigned to a currently non-existent “Game Setup” chapter that contains Space Politics, Mission Control, chargen, and the Mission Designer.

2. Mission Control (CR 37)

The book recommends players start as a national space agency for their first game, since it gives them high-quality crew (and is the only type of mission control to do so) plus a medium-quality spaceship.

Unfortunately the MCSU (Mission Control Social Unit, same color system as Space Politics) color for national space agencies is White, which is described as:

“White social units are nationalistic, conservative and family oriented and rely on limiting personal freedoms because of their moral beliefs but also in rewarding hard work and limiting the role of the state.”

Which is an extremely persuasive argument for never playing as a national space agency, on top of being kind of a mess of a contradictory description; if the society relies on limiting personal freedoms, it’s using the apparatus of the state to do so. That’s like, the whole point of conservatism: the people in power use the systems in place to hold on to power and keep anyone else from getting it.

Here we introduce the issues with the BSU color system (and there will be more): it lacks the variety and nuance available in the MtG color wheel and pinholes groups into a classification that is both reductive and contradictory.

Homebrew: I think that Mission Control’s color and type should be separated, giving players options of a Green National Military or a Red Launch Contractor. This issue will return later

Anyway, doing this rules-as-written, so I will just have to deal with it. I’ll go with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) because then I can amuse myself with making dumb anime jokes.

I also get a Mission Control subtype (roll 5, +1 for Purple SP), which gets me Trade Association.

“Trade association: The national space program is run by a professional association which makes different parts of the space program compete with each other but rarely if ever withdraws support for any part. Professional sports franchises are an example of a trade association.”

I honestly don’t know what to make of this, because the whole point of professional sports is going around in circles accomplishing nothing and that feels like a bad fit for a space program. This table is purely for flavor, though, so it doesn’t actually matter on the grand scale.

2.2 Other Starting Factions (SI 11)

Figuring out who else is in space requires switching books to This Space Intentionally, though the procedure itself is simple: roll 1d6 for the four other BSU colors, and on a roll ≤ 1 + the Era number the faction exists.

Proofing Note: Eras are always referred to by their name rather than their number, which gets unwieldy to remember.

Anyway, the only faction to get a 2 or lower is Green, so they’re going to be our First Wave Faction. First and Second Wave factions use the same mission control tables we do.

I roll a 6 for Regional Bloc, then 3 for Free Trade Zone and get ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). We don’t have to do anything else with them for now.

Commentary: Third Wave factions are described as “come[ing] from a much wider pool of potential real world organizations that follow this second wave” and then not included in any of the books - instead we’re told to email the author to get them. I have no idea why, since they could be put up on itch as a demo product for free until they are fully incorporated.

Commentary: Something I really, really like about the game is that other factions exist in a sort of quantum state where they’re doing their thing in the background and you don’t need to worry about them unless they overlap with what you’re doing. That is an extremely good way of limiting scope to manageable levels.

3. Spacecraft (CR 40)

There is an extremely complex build-your-own-ship system in 60 Years, inherited from High Frontier - thankfully, the book also provides six premade ships, two for each quality level, on handy printable cards. I roll odds, and end up with a 360-tonne electric rocket. I’m going to call it the Hayashida, because of course I’m going to.

Proofing Note: The premade ship cards start on CR 51 - The heading on CR 40 does not include a page number, only saying that they’re at the end of the chapter.

Proofing Note: The spaceship cards have criteria for upgrading, where you flip the card over upon hitting certain criteria - “Flip after X years at a Y class factory you helped build.” I don’t know how these relate to each other. Can I just upgrade whenever it's 5 years after launch? Do I have to park the ship at the factory and wait 5 years? Does the factory have to exist for 5 years?

4. Mission (CR 41)

First we roll d6 to find our mission type: 6 gets me an Industrial mission, so I bop on over to that subtable. There are some modifications to the second roll depending on my loadout: since my ship has an ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) 2 (lower is better) raygun (pew pew), the modified roll is 2d6-1, minus my ISRU of 2. I got 1+3 on the roll, minus 3 for the mods, back down to 1, which marks my destination as 5145 Pholus.

Wikipedia Dive: 5145 Pholus is an asteroid on one hell of an eccentric orbit - 91 years long, 8.8 AU at the short end and 31.9 at the maximum, crosses the orbits of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The bosses are sending us out to the fucking boonies with this one.

Mechanics-wise, though we don’t have to care about this part just yet, Pholus is a Size 4 site with Hydration 4, and can support a C-Class factory.

Proof Note: Probably best to add asteroid serial numbers for added clarity i.e. that they aren’t moons.

4.2 Determining Claim (SI 142)

Since we’re a second-wave crew, we have to roll to see if our mission site has already been claimed by another faction - this involves jumping books to This Space Intentionally again to a table with unclear directions: I’m operating under “roll Xd6 equal to Era #, add hydration, subtract Heliocentric Distance Modifier, compare the entry on the table to your target, if the criteria match then another faction is already there.”

I roll a 6 + 4 for hydration, -5 for distance; 5 on the table gets us a crewed Glory mission with inbound and outbound hazards.

Houserule: If the roll on this table doesn’t interfere with my mission, I'm going to give the faction a claim on a site that qualifies. 

In this case that’s going to be an unmodified d6 roll on the Glory destinations table on CR 42: 4 gets me Comet Wilson-Harrington for Green. They might have done more missions elsewhere, but quantum will elide that for now.

Wikipedia Dive: 4015 Wilson-Harrington is a comet about 4 km across with a rather small 4.25 year orbit that occasionally brings it relatively close (0.4 AU) to Earth. Solid pick, Green.

Hazard rolls are just a plain 1-in-6 for non-player factions, I roll two of those and…that’s a 1 and a 6. Green’s mission to Comet Wilson-Harrington is a catastrophic failure with all lives lost, though they still maintain a claim on the site.

Proofing Note: This table needs relabeled, “Claim Level” makes it seem like it’s measuring “How strong is the claim” when that isn’t a mechanic. This is more of an “NPC Mission Simulator”

3.2 Crew Module (CR 44)

So the last part of the ship is the Crew Module, where my astronauts will be living. It’s placed here, rather than with the rest of the spaceship section, because the Crew Module Builder heading is located inside the mission tables. There’s 3.5 pages of mission stuff, then half a page of crew module stuff, then another full page of mission tables, and then the table you roll on to determine the module.

Proofing Note: If keeping things in a coherent order would result in lots of whitespace, fill it with images, sidebars, or other fluff, or just keep the whitespace. I'd rather have stock images and whitespace than poorly-positioned tables.

I roll a 4 on the table, which means my module has Mass 1 / Rad-Hardness 4 /  Thrust 8 / Fuel Consumption 8 per burn / Aftetburn 2, ISRU 4, and has both a buggy and its own propulsion system.

5. Crew

Now, at last, we get to character generation. The placement here, after the ship and mission are already settled on, isn’t really an issue but I do think it wouldn’t hurt to move it back to after the Mission Control section.

Since I’m using a standard 4-person team, their roles are already set: I’ve got a Pilot, a Mission Specialist, a Payload Specialist (Engineer), and a second Payload Specialist specific to my Mission Control type. National agencies give us a Science Specialist.

Each role on the ship has two archetypes to choose from, which provide a character with their age, stats, skills, and service history. These are all pre-set, though you can adjust them later on with some point-buy.

Since my characters don’t have names yet, I’ll be calling them HAYASHIDA-#.

Stats are listed in order Physical / Mental / Social / Capital - I'm not using the point-buy system for stats or skills, premades all day erry day.

Though even with the premades there are bonus skill points: this is a problem, and will be explained below. I'll figure those out later.

HAYASHIDA-1

• Role: Pilot 
• Archetype: Test Pilot (Space Plane)
• Age: 42
• Stats: 5 / 5 / 4 / 4 
• Skills: Pilot 6, Devops 5, Engineer 5, Teleops 4, Industry 4, Research 4
• Service History: Carries the ripcord of a parachute that failed to open (backup worked)

HAYASHIDA-2

• Role: Mission Specialist 
• Archetype: Robotics Specialist
• Age: 31
• Stats: 4 / 5 / 5 / 4 
• Skills: Teleops 5, Research 5, Engineer 5, Industry 5, Bypass 4, Suffrage 4, Devops 4
• Service History:  Pet robot

HAYASHIDA-3

• Role: Payload Specialist #1 (Engineer)
• Archetype: Political Appointee
• Age: 37
• Stats: 5 / 4 / 5 / 5 
• Skills: Antitrust 5, Negotiate 5, Industry 5, Recruit 4, Combat Ops 4, Engineer, Firearms 4
• Service History: Has futurist mentor as contact.

HAYASHIDA-4

• Payload Specialist #2 (Science) 
• Archetype: Science Influencer
• Age: 30
• Stats: 4 / 5 / 5 / 5 
• Skills: Research 5, Antitrust 6, Interview 4, Devops 4, Bypass 4
• Service History: Athlete

Commentary: I actually really like the archetype system here, as it’s a good amount of flavor for something that only has a couple variables. And, most importantly, it’s one page per archetype. And the service history bits are reminiscent of MoSh trinkets and patches, which I love to see in any context, but with a wider array of options: characters could have false teeth, or ADHD, or ethics complaints.

Commentary: Annoyingly, there are minimum skill requirements for crew roles, and not all archetypes meet the minimum requirements for their own roles, necessitating that you spend your bonus skill points to reach baseline competency. Nah. Absolutely not. It's not a bonus skill if it's required, that's just a premade template that starts with fewer bonus points. If players are going to need to buy the skill anyway to play the game, it should be wrapped into the premade archetype.

5.1 Ranks (CR 80)

Rank is one of those things which is likely to come up more when playing this game zoomed-in, which I don’t plan on doing particularly often. It barely applies for White BSUs, since a character’s rank is literally just their position or just “Astronaut.” Its main purpose is for when you have multiple players and one of them pulls rank, which isn’t relevant to dollhouse solo play.

5.2 Parents (CR 83)

We have to calculate the Capital rating of each crewmember's parents by rolling 2d6, treating the crewmember's Capital as a third roll, and then picking the middle number. Then you use the difference in those two numbers to derive if they're still together or not.

Anyway. H-1 and H-4's parents have matching Capital scores, which is "Parents remain together financially despite different demographic backgrounds", and we a new nationality and ethnicity for a random parent. It doesn't specify which table to use here, but the other option of mixed-background parents says to use the Colonist Nationalities table on CR 100 so I'm going with that.

H-1's father is from Turkey, H-4's mother is from Tanzania. 

H-2 and H-4's parents remained married; H-2's father and H-4's mother have capital ratings of 2, which means that they were economic immigrants to Japan: H2's dad was born in Morocco, H4's mom was also born in Turkey. 

This is all for roleplaying purposes, but in this case the weird roundabout dice finagling ended up with an interesting result ie apparently this timeline involves Japan really loosening up immigration to avoid demographic collapse and gets a lot of migrants from Africa and the Eastern Med. That's actually really cool, I like this section a lot more than I thought I would.

5.3 Siblings (CR 83)

1d6-1 four times, take the second lowest for # of siblings; lowest result +1 is your position; middle result of 3 rolls of 1d6-1 indicates age gaps between siblings.

H-1 and H-2 are only children, H-3 and H-4 are the youngest of 5 and 4 children, respectively. I rolled for age gaps, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t like bonds in Delta Green, there’s no mechanical aspect to these characters, they’re for fluff purposes and roleplaying when you’re at the zoomed-in character level.

5.4 Disposition (CR 84)

These are tied to like, a family-level BSU and I don’t know why. It’s just a d6 roll for “how did you grow up”. probably shouldn’t be named “disposition”, it’s too close to outlook and philosophy.

H-1 & H-4 were basically latchkey kids, H-2 had issues with authority, H-3’s parents were disciplinarians. 

5.5  Callsigns (CR 84, table is on CR 86)

Instead of names (since there are so dang many cultural backgrounds astronauts come from), the game gives everyone a two-word callsign as their main identification. Despite my evergreen adoration for a good ol’ Delta Green style “Agents HODAG, FLATWOOD, and DOVER walk into a bar armed to the teeth”, the sauce is not here with the list. Rolling on the d666 table I get:

• Turnover Scale
• Patient Vector
• Geyser Albedo
• Force Rocket

Patient Vector is good, but the rest aren’t hitting. Force Rocket is fucking fantastic, but that’s because it’s incredibly silly.

I think that part of the issue comes from the usage of themed names, but the themes are aspirations, computing, engineering, physics, planetology, and rocketry - appropriate to the setting they may be, but most of them lack oomph. Legendary swords might not be space focused, but it gives you Caliburn, Dhulfiqar, Hrunting and Nandaka and that’s an upgrade from Humble, Map, Fin and Plume.

A good callsign helps evoke the characters qualities, even vaguely: if four astronauts are only going to be named Sparrow, Magpie, Falcon and Vulture, players would have something to work with even with no other indicators of personality.

Homebrew: Single-word callsigns better, but there needs to be a better list. Or just Shipname-plus number.

Since I haven’t filled out the demographic details yet, I’m going to hold off on names. When I actually get to them, I am probably going to do what I usually do, which is look up sports teams from that country and start grabbing names. Or in this case, more Dorohedoro and/or Dai Dark references.

5.6 Outlook & Philosophy (CR 85 & CR 88)

Andrew informed me on Bluesky that these elements were getting replaced in the next version, and since I’m not going to be zoomed-in much at all I am not supremely attached to them. They’re more fiddly than they’re worth, and I’d rather just use one of the many disposition / personality tables I have lying around. 

I am, however, going to use this as an opportunity to illustrate why the color system doesn’t really work as written.

The Green crew philosophy is Liberal - 

“Liberals usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles."

If we move up to the Mission Control BSUs (CR 37), we get

“Green BSUs are cooperatives, unionized or socialist organizations…[they] are socialist and collectivist with few restrictions on personal freedoms but an overall expectation that a person will sacrifice some of their economic gains for the state."

But if we look over to the Green mission control type (CR 39) it’s “Regional Organization”, the provided table is for Regional Trade Blocs, with the options

• The European Union
• MERCOSUR (the Southern Common Market)
• SACU (South African Customs Union)
• GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)
• CAN (Andean Community)
• A Free Trade Area (NAFTA, APTA, ASEAN, ALADI, CISFTA, SAARC)

If the Gulf Cooperation Council - consisting of  Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates - qualifies as a socialist organization that defends civil liberties and freedom of expression, I’ll eat an entire hat.

When rolling for social / political / mission control trends, higher numbers = better results, lower numbers can lead to some real Mothership horrorshows. The BSU colors exist on a linear spectrum,, where you get a flat bonus / malus ranging from -2 to +2 on a 2d6 roll, or -2 to +7 on 1d6, which are ordered as follows:

• Red (Authoritarian)
• White (Nationalist)
• Green (Liberal/Leftist)
• Purple (Centrist)
• Orange (Capitalist/Libertarian)

SpaceX and Lockheed Martin, as Launch Contractors, are Orange factions; within the mechanics of the game, space-society is better off under the purview of Lockheed Martin than anyone else. 

You know, that sterling paragon of human rights, Lockheed Martin! Lockheed Martin, who is currently raking in immense profits as their products are used to slaughter civilians in Ukraine and Palestine, that Lockheed Martin! Lockheed Martin, a company whose entire existence is predicated on the mass production of ghosts and corpses!

That Lockheed Martin.

The MtG color wheel works because it’s based on vibes and association: scale it up, scale it down, apply it to whatever, it’ll work in the same way a horoscope works - because it’s not linked to anything real. A fascistic hellhole and a fully automated communist utopia could both be white/black. The set’s main villain and hero could both be monoblue. You could have a green vampire and it would be a noteworthy departure from the norm, but it wouldn’t be impossible. 

If you link the color wheel to something specific and real, it’s going to fall apart because reality is a contradictory morass of bullshit and nothing in the universe has nice neat gameable divisions. The one thing that doesn’t have exceptions is the rule that there are always exceptions.

Homebrew: As with the Space Politics, I think the best option here is to use a nice, generalized "how's shit at home?" defcon scale. Disconnect them from mission control types so every type can be every color, and adjust the political trends that change your MSCU color to more general "shit gets worse / better back home" instead of explicit adoption of new forms of politics. Folks can imagine what that entails, especially with the trends doing heavy lifting.

Homebrew: Honestly, Purple and Green should probably have their political trends switched. Or maybe political trends can also be from adjacent columns. Or maybe political trends can be dropped, or maybe they need a total overhaul. I don't know, I like the political trends the least of the three types and find them the least interesting by far.

 

5.7 Sleeping Arrangements (CR 89)

An optional bit to determine who’s bunking with who. The section says it’s not necessarily a sexual relationship, but with the way the section is actually written that feels rather flimsy. There’s some MCSU-specific stuff, but I don’t think it adds much even to this already-optional section. 

I would normally ignore this, since I’m going full zoomed-out play, but I’ll do it for illustrative purposes.

You have to roll 1d6-1 at [-] for every crewmember, representing # of potential arrangements. Then you roll for the intended recipient of each potential arrangement. Then any reciprocal arrangements are kept and the rest are ditched.

Crunching the numbers: H-1, H-3, and H-4 have earthside partners, though H-1 and H-2  have a thing going while on mission. 

Since my BSU is White, I then ignore basically of that, because White factions mandate relationships at home, and intra-crew ones are not permitted. I don’t know why this comes after the roll. Anyway, H-1 and H-2 have a thing and mission control doesn’t know.

5.8 Nationality (CR 98)

With the crunch out of the way, we start on the demographics fluff. I don’t know why this is after we calculated the crew’s parents’ economic bracket, since normally you want to go broad > focused with this sort of thing. But I digress. 

“Crew and mission control contact nationalities will match the mission control nationality on a 2D6 roll less than or equal to the nationality mix number determined by the mission control or faction BSU. In the Crewed Rules, this will be 2 if the mission control or faction is Red, 3 if White, 4 if Green, 5 if Purple and 6 if Orange.”

I think the bolded bit is an error, because as-written it means that crew in Red factions have only a 1-in-36 (2.77%!!!!) chance of being from the org’s nation of origin, despite being the space fascist BSU.

So I flipped the roll, nationality matches if you roll higher than the provided number. All four of my crew rolled over, so everyone is from Japan.

5.9 Ethnicity (CR 105)

Three options available here for Japan: Hisabetsu Buraku, Japanese, Ryukuyan. While I would love to have Golden Kamuy in space, Ainu is not an option. None of my crew get an ethnic minority.

Proofing Note: The tables are found after the Gender and Pronoun sections, despite the headings being before them.

Proofing Note: Several countries (DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania) on the nationality table are appended with “AfriSpace”, a term that appears only on this table and a minor faction blurb for Somali Pirates In Space (apparently not a joke). Digging around Wikipedia I was able to find two hits for “AfriSpace” - a defunct satellite radio company that abandoned that name in ‘92, and an early proposed name (~2012) for the African Space Agency (founded in 2023). I can only assume this is a remnant from a draft written before the founding of the ASA, that was probably aiming for an org related to the East African Community / proposed East African Confederation / Federation. Though the EAC doesn’t include Ethiopia or North Sudan, and otherwise includes Burundi, Somalia, Rwanda, and Uganda.

 

5.10 Languages (CR 105)

Since none of my crew are Ryukuyan, they all speak Japanese.

5.11 Gender (CR 101)

This is actually the table for determining sex, and it includes several neat sci-fi options that are unavailable until later eras. My pilot is a lady, the other three are dudes.

5.12 Pronouns (CR 103)

This is the table for “public pronouns”, i.e. what everyone goes by in the public sphere according to broader social conventions influenced by space politics. The idea is that every time the game moves into a new era, you roll on this table to see what pronouns everyone uses.

I rolled a 6, +3 for Purple space politics is 9: they / them / their / their / themself

"…indicate a willingness to engage with preferred pronouns without adopting a gender inclusive interpretation. They-singular allows for private gender expression which does not publicly intrude on others: if gender is publicly expressed, then the preferred pronoun will be used instead of They-singular. The individual can choose whether their public pronoun is their preferred pronoun.”

I get what the intent was, but I don’t think it works at all.

The primary issue here is that it’s entirely dependent on Anglophone conceptualizations of how gender and language intersect. Many languages from all over the world don’t make gender distinction at all in pronouns, or the distinction isn’t male / female (usually animate / inanimate).

ex. Modern Standard Chinese only has a difference between he / she / it (animate) / it (inanimate) in writing, and that was only introduced after increased contact with Europe: in speech, they’re still all pronounced identically, tā.

This table then kinda smooshes together 

• How crewmembers identify themselves (the pronouns themselves)
• General cultural attitudes towards gender (the descriptions)

And some of these descriptions are pretty goofy, ex:

“Hehe or sheshe [...] pronouns are used by gender anxious societies to stress the differences between genders. In some instances, the number of hes and shes may literally match the number of X and Y chromosomes the individuals has (especially where XYY and XXX chromosomal individuals are idealized; 1 in 6 ), but usually one of the pronouns is used to indicate the individual’s gender presentation and the other the “biological gender”, whatever that means. If the Space Politics is White, mixed gender pronouns are discriminated against”

There is no natural language that even comes close to this, to the point where it reads like a parody; the social element is just “cultural anxiety about non-conformative gender presentation”, it doesn't need to be exaggerated to this extent to get the point across.

TLDR if this is going to remain in the game, I think it should be split into two tables: one for the broader cultural attitudes (modified by space politics) and one for character-by-character expression (modified by MCSU)

And with that, we're basically done with setup. Next post, the Hayashida sets out on her great voyage to frozen asteroid in the ass-end of nowhere.

 

Cue the Outro Music

I have definitely, 100% missed some bits. Comes with the territory, and the layout doesn't help.

But. Through a combination of book updates and me just reading things enough for them to start making sense (wait until we actually get to space travel, it took me 45 minutes to figure out a single paragraph.) have put this in the realm of actually potentially playable.

It is still an immeasurably frustrating game, and its frustrating because it scratches an itch that no one else is scratching. I am the target audience for this game. "Hard-science procedural space exploration solo rpg" could only be more me-coded if there were magical neanderthals in it, and you know what I've read ahead in All Errors and there are definitely neanderthals!

But it's just the highest-friction game I've ever done read. Having to switch between multiple books to set up a basic game, having to constantly flip back and forth because tables that aren't where they're supposed to be or because sections aren't in a logical order, having to reread single paragraphs five, ten, twenty times because the directions don't parse...all of that is absolutely maddening. And I am not going to be one of those people who comes out the other end and says "but it was all worth it", because it absolutely isn't: the complexity of the game is friction enough, the basic task of reading the book and understanding the game rules shouldn't be this hard. Tables should go under the appropriate section headings and no reasoning known to man or beast will convince me otherwise. I desperately wish this game had an open license or a SRD.

Regardless. The white whale is in my sights.